I love working on stories that get left behind in the race for the daily headlines – journalistic orphans,” said Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen. “Often, the most worthwhile and convincing images tend to lurk within the hidden, oblique stories that fly just below the radar.”
We meet Bendiksen outside National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. He has spent most of the day editing pictures for the April 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine, featuring freshwater sources in the Himalayas. He is concerned about the melting of the glaciers in the area and the consequences it will have for the millions of people who are dependent on these sources for their daily water supply.
Having spent months of his life living in slums on three continents, the photographer understands what the lack of basic commodities such as water, electricity, and sewage has on the quality of life. In the fall of 2009 he showed “The Places We Live” at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibit was the culmination of a three-year project documenting households and families in the slums of Kibera (Nairobi, Kenya), Dharavi (Mumbai, India), the barrios (Caracas, Venezuela), and the kampongs (Jakarta, Indonesia). “The neighborhoods pictured in the exhibition are some of the densest and poorest places on earth. My goal was to capture the vast range of ways the inhabitants experience their surroundings – from the destitute to the ambitious and surprising,” Bendiksen said.
Spending time in the slums allowed the 28-year old to get close to the dwellers and see beyond statistics and common perceptions of poverty. “In the exhibit I wish to humanize the statistics, to show the single human over an anonymous number.”
Through his installations he provides a three-dimensional experience of daily life in a slum. Projecting photographs on four walls simultaneously as interviews and stories from the inhabitants play over loudspeakers, the audience comes to understand the hardship of living under extremely challenging conditions. We hear the frustration of not being an official part of the cityscape and lacking access to the same amenities as the rest of the population, and see the sparse conditions they live under. At the same time, we are made aware of the variation of destinies within the slum; we sense a dignity and resourcefulness not often associated with slum dwellers. New light is shed on the stories of individuals within the slum and the residents as individuals become multifaceted.
For the first time in history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. More than 1 billion people, one third of urban dwellers, reside in slums. The United Nations predicts that the number of slum dwellers will double within the next 25 years and that cities will face tremendous challenges to accommodate this influx of people.
“The Places We Live” is an official program of the 2009 World Habitat Day, an annual event established by the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UN-HABITAT). Norway is a donor and in October, 2009, pledged $1 million for the newly established Opportunities Fund for Urban Youth-Led Development.
Jonas Bendiksen is the only Norwegian or Nordic to be part of the renowned photographic cooperative Magnum. Bendiksen’s works have been featured in international publications such as National Geographic, Newsweek, Geo, and Vanity Fair.